ICT Minister announces decree to modify the mechanism for proposing Public-Private Partnerships projects
Colombia
25 octubre 2019

The Minister of Information and Communication Technologies (MinTIC), Sylvia Constaín, announced that in the coming days, the Ministry will publish a decree on Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the technology sector, which will result in the private sector being able to make suggestions, comments and proposals directly to the National Government concerning PPPs. The announcement was made during an Entrepreneurship Workshop held in the city of Medellin, which was led by the President of the Republic, Ivan Duque, and which served as a way for the Government and unions to respond to the concerns of entrepreneurs in the country’s creative industries.

The Ministry defines PPPs as collaborative initiatives between different levels of government and business-people and/or investors to promote, develop and maintain investments in all sectors of social and productive infrastructure. In relation to the decree, Constaín announced that “in this way the scheme that had been in place up to now is changed, which consisted of the Government having to think of something, open a bidding process and call on the private sector to participate”. With this decree, the Government will be able to “receive proposals directly from the sector to be able to advance on projects and not only rely on the initiative of the Government”.

Regarding the creation of new models of flexible regulation in technologies to improve the provision of services in the country, Constaín announced that the Communications Regulation Committee (CRC) is about to present the “Regulatory Sandbox”. This involves creating a closed test environment designed to experiment safely with software development projects. In this way, it seeks to energize the ICT sector and generate innovation with models that have not been explored in Colombia. “We have the possibility of having a regulatory scheme within a safe area, so that innovation is done here, accompanied by the government and that will help us find where we have to make regulatory changes that respond to Colombian innovation,” explained the Minister.

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